Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Transmission from a base-station to a mobile device may be spread across in time and frequency using a spreading technique, such as orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). A spreading technique may be used in many modern mobile standards, such as Long Term Evolution (LTE), to assign time and frequency slots to individual user devices.
Base stations may determine spectral allocations (time slots and frequencies or channels) for mobile devices within their coverage area to provide better signal-to-noise performance for the devices. However, the spectral allocations for different mobile devices may sometimes overlap meaning that at some point in time two or more mobile devices may be allocated to the same sub-carrier. As the time-frequency space becomes gradually filled by early users, later users may have to settle for remaining slots, which may not be optimal (e.g., from a signal-to-noise ratio) from their viewpoint.